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WE WOULDN’T WANT CALM POLITICS, WOULD WE?

Another week, another set of upheavals: they ranged from a canceled peace summit with North Korea to an CV-inflating professor getting Italy’s top job and onto major American websites blocking Europeans over misplaced fears of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Then there was the European Parliament blowing its chance to hold Mark Zuckerberg accountable over privacy, during the very week that the EU finally set a global policy agenda on something. We discuss that and other tech wrecks in this week’s EU Confidential podcast.

Today’s big news is of course: More than two-thirds of voters have backed repealing Ireland’s strict abortion ban, according to two separate exit polls conducted Friday.

Voters were asked whether to repeal the Irish constitution’s eighth amendment — which gives mother and the unborn an equal right to life — and give the parliament the ability to legislate on abortion.

While the official tally won’t be completed until later this afternoon, Ireland is poised to align its abortion laws with the European mainstream. A win for the ‘Yes’ campaign will mark the second major progressive step by Irish voters in recent years, following the referendum to allow same-sex marriage in 2015.

Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who backed repealing the ban, tweeted Friday: “Thank you to everyone who voted today. Democracy in action. It’s looking like we will make history tomorrow…”

Best wishes to Georgia: Today is the 100th anniversary of the first Georgian Democratic Republic. European Commission President Juncker is in Tbilisi to attend the celebrations. The government of Georgia is pushing hard to be considered a candidate for EU membership.

ONE-ON-ONE

How some in Silicon Valley want to stop a Big Tech brain hijack

Tristan Harris, a consummate Silicon Valley insider, says the tech industry needs to abandon its assumption that it’s a force for good in the world. It’s better to ask “what if everything we were doing is bad,” he told EU Confidential.

“There’s a fundamental misalignment between what’s best for business — which is sucking attention out of 2 billion people’s brains and making it as manipulable as possible to a third party — and what’s best for democracy, for truth, for society or for mental health,” he said.

Harris compared the addictive qualities of social media to “an extraction-based economy” that “becomes this kind of race to the bottom of the brainstem.” The knock-on effects extend “across every single domain” of life.

Unusually for a tech evangelist, Harris embraces the prospect of regulation: Fundamental change, he said, “is not going to happen alone through self-regulation [though] I would love for it to be true.”

Harris has signed up several Facebook alumni to his Center for Human Technology, people “who actually understand the dynamics of how this stuff gets made. So from that perspective we can offer common sense kinds of protections and regulations.”

Back in the 1970s, the work of Harris’ center was done by the U.S. government’s Office of Technology Assessment. The closure of that office coincided with the Wild West era of tech innovation we’ve seen up until now.

Harris said the pricing of election campaign ads is a practical example of how broken tech platforms are. He said an ad space should cost the same for all candidates but that “in some cases there is like a 17-to-1 price difference for one campaign over another.”

Facebook, he noted, is “steering 2 billion people’s thoughts in languages that the engineers don’t even speak, which can have resulting effects downstream in Sri Lanka or Myanmar.”

To get out of this loop, Harris suspects tech platforms need a new business model.

“So long as the business model of these companies is advertising they’re in a race to get more aggressive and persuasive and manipulative to get that attention, which is why it feels like we’re losing control and we’re addicted all the time,” he said.

TRAVEL CORNER

First-world problems: The gap between the Diamond Lounge (managed by the roadside food chain Autogrill) and Brussels Airlines’ Loft lounge is growing at Brussels Airport. There are now nap and steam rooms in the Loft. The Diamond Lounge, on the other hand, won’t even let you keep the newspapers and magazines, and won’t allow customers to take bottles of water with them when they leave.

ROYAL WEDDING

Diplomat before princess: Meghan Markle is both the first descendant of slaves and first former State Department intern to be married into the British royal family.

EU WTF?!

When Jean-Claude Juncker, above, implored us to imagine different scenarios for the future of Europe, and came up with five of his own, he probably didn’t consider civil war and a Tinder-like app replacing the European elections as options. But in this era of political bots, fake news and digital propaganda, Giuseppe Porcaro of the think tank Bruegel has taken a radical approach to EU reform and come up with a dystopian novel called “Disco Sour.” It launched Thursday at Beurscafé-Beursschouwburg in the center of Brussels.

TECHNOLOGY

GDPR is bringing out the worst in people: Brendan Barnes, the newly appointed data protection officer at EFPIA, a pharmaceutical lobby group, didn’t get off to a good start. In an email seen by POLITICO, he asked a bunch of EFPIA’s contacts to consent to continue having their data processed. The problem was he put them all in the cc line (not bcc) and also asked them to reply all to the email. We hate to break it to EFPIA, but that’s not the point of GDPR.

Meanwhile, EU DisinfoLab, an NGO that bills itself as working “to fortify the European fake news-fighting front,” also landed in hot water. They accidentally emailed out the addresses of 340 of their key contacts. Their apology email read: “A few days ago, an email has been sent to you from the EU DisinfoLab, inviting you to participate to one of our events. This email publicly exposed your contact details to our entire mailing list … The person who sent this email is no longer working for our organisation.”

BEER TIP

Lucky commuters were treated to free (low or no alcohol) Maes beer at 8 a.m. at Brussels Midi Station on Tuesday. It’s never too early in Belgium.

COFFEE TIP

Café Coop at Demetskaai 23, on the Anderlecht side of the Brussels canal. It’s on the fifth floor with a huge outdoor terrace and views. And best of all — you paid for it, with EU regional subsidies.